Water is a precious commodity and is no longer treated as a limitless resource. It is becoming commonplace for communities, enterprise organizations, and residences to have mandated cutbacks imposed in an attempt to save as much water as possible. In considering where and how to limit water use, flow and leakage issues have to be rapidly diagnosed and resolved.
Sensing of water flow has been conducted using in-line water meters. While such meters are accurate and reliable, it is too expensive and intrusive to place an in-line metering device at every water-demanding appliance. Until such meters are built into every faucet, toilet, showerhead, irrigation valve, etc., an inexpensive monitoring solution should be pursued.
Also, liquid flow measurement is available to industry using ultrasonic sensing technology. Such technology employs ultrasonic meters to sense the ultrasonic Doppler change in a frequency range due to fluid flow. However, ultrasonic meters are impractical to scale across an enterprise organization because they are too expensive, designed to work only on larger pipes, and often have to be attached using a conductive grease.
An inexpensive and easily scalable solution is desired to measure water usage and provide meaningful water usage metrics to planners in government and industry, as well as to individual consumers.